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ABSTRACT
This essay explores a word-based public art project. In its quotidian presence and its technical violation of historic district codes, the project enables varied interactions. The project requires us to revise our understanding of rhetorical situation, rhetorical space, and rhetorical ecology by understanding public art as a space for encounter: places and moments that enable engagement between and among humans and place that amplify the sense of the contingency of public space. They are important realms for activating a democratic ethos for the city. This concept attends to the intentionality and contingency of rhetorical interaction seeing space as contextual but not determinative, a place of convergence. Using oral history interviews with hosts of the words and participant observation of two historic district hearings, I read the hearings, and the words, as spaces that mobilize a convergence zone between the intimate and the public. Building on encounter and spatial theory, this essay offers a defense of the mid-level as a register of political practice that can be glimpsed in cultural processes.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks the editor and anonymous reviewers, Victoria Gallagher, Emily Winderman, Michaela Frischherz, Heather Woods, Lisa Silvestri, Kimberly Singletary, Emily Herrington and Paul Elliott Johnson for comments on earlier versions of this text, and to FER undergraduate RA Christina Potenza. Thanks to City of Asylum and word hosts for their participation in and support of oral history interviews.
Notes
1 Deborah Fallows, “Language as Art in Pittsburgh: Exiled Writers Use Words as Art and Inspire a Community,” The Atlantic, March 21, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/language-as-art-in-pittsburgh/474342/; Diana Nelson Jones, “Can Artistic Words Remain on Historic North Side Facades?” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 16, 2015, https://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2015/03/16/Can-artistic-words-remain-on-historic-N-Side-facades/stories/201502050200.
2 Caitlin Bruce, Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019), 1–5, 180.
3 Mary Louise Pratt coined the idea of “contact zones” in her landmark study of travel writing as imperial/colonial practice, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2007). This concept has been significant in human geography in thinking about spaces of encounter: Kye Askins and Rachel Pain. “Contact Zones: Participation, Materiality, and the Messiness of Interaction,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 5 (2011): 803–21.
4 Nigel Thrift, “But for Malice Aforethought: Cities and the Natural History of Hatred,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30, no. 2 (2005): 133–50.
5 Bonnie Honig, “Public Things: Jonathan Lear's Radical Hope, Lars von Trier's Melancholia, and the Democratic Need,” Political Research Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2015): 623–36.
6 Lauren Berlant, “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 3 (2016): 393–419.
7 Ash Amin, “Collective Culture and Urban Public Apace,” City 12, no. 1 (2008): 5–24; Jeff Popke, “Geography and Ethics: Non-Representational Encounters, Collective Responsibility and Economic Difference,” Progress in Human Geography 33, no. 1 (2009): 81–90; Gil Valentine, “Living with Difference: Reflections on Geographies of Encounter,” Progress in Human Geography 32, no. 3 (2008): 323–37.
8 Kris Cohen, Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 52.
9 William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
10 Lars Tønder, Tolerance: A Sensorial Orientation to Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
11 Chantal Mouffe, “Agonistic Politics between Ethics and Politics,” Critique & humanism 35, special issue, (2010): 13–22.
12 Geoff Vigar, Susannah Gunn, and Elizabeth Brooks. “Governing Our Neighbours: Participation and Conflict in Neighbourhood Planning,” Town Planning Review July-Aug (2017): 423.
13 Honig, “Public Things.”
14 Honig, “Public Things.”
15 Joan Faber McAlister, “Collecting the Gaze: Memory, Agency, and Kinship in the Women's Jail Museum, Johannesburg,” Women's Studies in Communication 36, no. 1 (2013): 1–27; Brent Saindon, “A Doubled Heterotopia: Shifting Spatial and Visual Symbolism in the Jewish Museum Berlin's Development,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 1 (2012): 24–48; Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no.1 (2006): 27–47.
16 Margaret R. LaWare and Victoria J. Gallagher, “The Power of Agency: Urban Communication and the Rhetoric of Public Art,” in The Urban Communication Reader, eds. Burd, Drucker and Gumpert (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007).
17 Kenneth S. Zagacki and Victoria Gallagher, “Rhetoric and Materiality in the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 2 (2009): 171–91.
18 Margaret R. LaWare, “Encountering Visions of Aztlan: Arguments for Ethnic Pride, Community Activism and Cultural Revitalization in Chicano Murals.” Argumentation and Advocacy 34, no. 3 (1998): 140–53; Darrel Enck-Wanzer, “Tropicalizing East Harlem: Rhetorical Agency, Cultural Citizenship, and Nuyorican Cultural Production,” Communication Theory 21, no. 4 (2011): 344–67.
19 Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics: The Rhetorical Performances of the Civil Rights Memorial,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30, no. 2 (2000): 31–55.
20 Roxanne Mountford, “On Gender and Rhetorical Space,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2001): 41–71; Richard Marback, “The Rhetorical Space of Robben Island,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2004): 7–27.
21 Jenny Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2005): 13.
22 Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); see emphasis in Rice, “Unframing Models,” 11.
23 Rice, “Unframing Models,” 9.
24 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985).
25 Kevin DeLuca, “Articulation Theory: A Discursive Grounding for Rhetorical Practice,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 32, no. 4 (1999): 334–48.
26 Deluca, “Articulation Theory,” 336.
27 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” Media, Culture & Society 2, no. 1 (1980): 59.
28 Henry Jenkins, “Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence Culture,’” Cultural Studies 28, no. 2 (2014): 267.
29 Berlant, “The Commons,” 394, 412.
30 I conducted oral history interviews with 22 interlocutors. I asked the same set of questions, and received permission to use their full names and publicize the transcripts, most of which are on my blog. I deposited audio from the hearings with the City of Asylum. Oral histories are IRB exempt at my home institution. See: caitlinfrancesbruce.com.
31 Jiyeon Kang, “Corporeal Memory and the Making of a Post-Ideological Social Movement: Remembering the 2002 South Korean Candlelight Vigils,” Journal of Korean Studies 17, no. 2 (2012): 329–50.
32 Michaela Frischherz, “Affective Agency and Transformative Shame: The Voices Behind the Great Wall of Vagina,” Women's Studies in Communication 38, no. 3 (2015): 251–72; Caitlin Bruce and Elise Homan. “Crossing Borders, Building Solidarity: Affective Labor in Shaping Coalitional Murals,” Women's Studies in Communication 41, no. 3 (2018): 224–45.
33 Julia Lossau and Quentin Stevens, eds. The Uses of Art in Public Space (New York: Routledge, 2014).
34 Candice Rai, Democracy's Lot: Rhetoric, Publics, and the Places of Invention (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016), 174.
35 Linda Flower, “Talking Across Difference: Intercultural Rhetoric and the Search for Situated Knowledge,” College Composition and Communication 55, no. 1 (2003): 40, 43.
36 Yi-Fu Tuan, “Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81, no. 4 (1991): 684.
37 Tuan, “Language and the Making of Place,” 686.
38 Ibid, 688–9.
39 Israel Centeno, Personal Interview, March 22, 2015. Centeno's gesture of bringing the Venezuelan tradition of public name writing to Pittsburgh is part of a larger and longer history of Latinx/Chican@/Caribbean art and activism in the U.S. On this see: Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Catalina M. de Onís. “Rethinking Rhetorical Field Methods on a Precarious Planet,” Communication Monographs 85, no. 1 (2018): 103–22; Claire F. Fox, Making Art Panamerican: Cultural Policy and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Richard D. Pineda and Stacey K. Sowards, “Flag Waving as Visual Argument: 2006 Immigration Demonstrations and Cultural Citizenship,” Argumentation and Advocacy 43, no. 3–4 (2007): 164–74; Michelle A. Holling and Bernadette Marie Calafell, “Identities on Stage and Staging Identities: ChicanoBrujo Performances as Emancipatory Practices,” Text and Performance Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2007): 58–83; Laura E. Pérez, Chicana Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Lisa A. Flores, “Creating Discursive Space Through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 2 (1996): 142–56.
40 Jennifer Edbauer Rice, “Meta/Physical Graffiti: ‘Getting Up’ as Affective Writing Model,” JAC 25, no. 1 (2005): 131–60.
41 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 225–7.
42 Berlant, Cruel Optimism.
43 Deena Kelly, Personal interview, February 28, 2015.
44 Yi-Fu Tuan, “Humanistic Geography,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 66, no. 2 (1976): 266–76.
45 Jennifer Tharp, Personal interview, February 22, 2015.
46 Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
47 Scot Barnett and Casey Boyle, Introduction to Rhetorical Ontology, or, How to Do Things with Things (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016): 5; see also Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 3.
48 Sarah Sims Erwin, Personal Interview, March 7, 2015.
49 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 167.
50 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 165–7.
51 Rice, “Unframing Models,” 13.
52 Dan Rooney and Carol Peterson, Allegheny City: A History of Pittsburgh's North Side (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 206.
53 Rooney and Peterson, Allegheny City, 217.
54 Ibid., 224.
55 Stephanie R. Ryberg, “Preservation at the Grassroots: Pittsburgh's Manchester and Cincinnati's Mt. Auburn Neighborhoods,” Journal of Planning History 10, no. 2 (2011): 141.
56 Sharon Zukin, “Gentrification: Culture and Capital in the Urban Core,” Annual Review of Sociology 13, no. 4 (1987): 129–47.
57 Gary Lefebvre, Personal Interview, February 23, 2015.
58 Yue Zhang, “Boundaries of Power: Politics of Urban Preservation in Two Chicago Neighborhoods,” Urban Affairs Review 47, no. 4 (2011): 511–40.
59 Bill Steen, Personal Interview, February 15, 2015.
60 Gwendolyn Moorer, Personal Interview, February 22, 2015. Ellipses signal elisions of text.
61 Ibid.
62 Paul Hluchan, Personal Interview, February 14, 2015.
63 Richard Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York: Routledge, 2010).
64 Cohen, Never Alone, Except for Now, 90.
65 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “Policy and Planning,” Social Text 100 (Fall 2009): 183.
66 Richard Sennett argues for a more even balance between city planners and community members in Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City (New York: Allen Lane, 2018). He asserts the importance of seeing the city as “porous, incomplete, and multiple.” However, his call for rootlessness does not grapple with problems of urban inequality (thinking here about Mindy Thompson Fullilove's idea of “root shock,” as an effect of gentrification).
67 Richard Marback, “Unclenching the Fist: Embodying Rhetoric and Giving Objects their Due,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38, no. 1 (2008): 59.
68 Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It (New York: New Village Press, 2016).
69 Moorer, Personal Interview; Rebecca White and Jeff Frazier, Personal interview, February 22, 2015.
70 Terri Wieszorek and Jorg Wieszorek, Personal interview, March 22, 2015.
71 Erwin, Personal Interview.
72 Diana Nelson Jones, Personal interview, February 23, 2015.
73 Wieszorek and Wieszorek.
74 Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 12–13.
75 Kendall R. Phillips, “The Failure of Memory: Reflections on Rhetoric and Public Remembrance,” Western Journal of Communication 74, no. 2 (2010): 218.
76 Laura Grantmyre, “Conflicting Visions of Renewal in Pittsburgh's Hill District, 1950–1968,” Urban History 43, no. 4 (2016): 639.
77 Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014): vii–10.
78 Rice, “Rhetorical Ecologies.”